by Sarah Cammarata at Stars and Stripes
A “victorious U.S. withdrawal” from Afghanistan was impossible to achieve because the U.S. government created unrealistic timelines to rebuild the country, leading to short-term fixes such as injections of troops, money and resources, according to the watchdog agency created by Congress to provide oversight.
U.S. officials also pushed their own political aims without taking into account what was achievable, a report released Tuesday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, concluded in its final “lessons learned.” By relying on quick-fix solutions, U.S. programs ultimately worsened the issues that they were meant to address.
“By design, these timelines often ignored conditions on the ground and forced reckless compromises in U.S. programs, creating perverse incentives to spend quickly and focus on short-term, unsustainable goals that could not create the conditions to allow a victorious U.S. withdrawal,” according to the report.
The U.S. continued to draw down troops and resources, despite recognizing the Afghan government’s failure to address its instability, the report said.
The government’s unrealistic timelines — devised on the “mistaken” belief that the choices in Washington could “transform the calculus of complex Afghan institutions, powerbrokers and communities contested by the Taliban” — is one of seven lessons explained in the report that the U.S. must learn after almost two decades of war.
Since Congress created SIGAR in the fiscal 2009 National Defense Authorization Act to provide independent oversight on the billions of dollars appropriated for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, the inspector general has systematically detailed years of waste, corruption and fraud. In the agency’s last quarterly report, SIGAR chief John Sopko provided a grim outlook on the future of a country that the U.S. has spent 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild. The Defense Department has also spent an additional $837 billion on warfighting, during which 2,443 American troops and 1,144 allied troops have been killed and 20,666 U.S. troops injured, according to the report.
On Sunday, Taliban fighters poured into Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, ending the Afghan government’s rule of the country and signaling the final stage of the U.S. involvement there. Images struck a nerve for many Americans on Monday morning of thousands of desperate Afghans clinging to and chasing after U.S. military aircraft in an attempt to flee the country…
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